Joe-Kyari Gadzama, who came second in the recently held Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) presidential election says the poll was rigged against him.
Mr. Gadzama, Senior Defender of Nigeria (SAN), was defeated by Yakubu Maikyau, another Senior Defender in the elections that took place on Saturday 16th July.
PREMIUM TIMES reported that Mr. Maikyau emerged as the winner of the Nigerian Law Enforcement election after garnering a total of 22,342 votes to beat his main opponent, Joe-Kyari Gadzama, who garnered 10,842 votes.
The third-place candidate, Taidi Gunu, received 380 votes, accounting for four percent of the total 34,554 votes that were collected for the position.
But the credibility of the election that began at 12 noon on Saturday July 16 and ended at 12 midnight by electronic voting is being questioned by Gadzama.
accusations
Before Saturday’s election, Gadzama said his poll agent, Andrew Madaki, “tested the vulnerability of the website to conduct the election” and found that “the website was susceptible to tampering.”
He noted that the concerns were brought to the attention of the Electoral Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association (ECNBA).
Yakubu Maikyau, President of the NBA
In a statement Gadzama issued on Wednesday, he further stated that his agent “discovered numerous irregularities and expressed them through a letter sent by email to the ECNBA at 2:00 pm.”
Giving details of “irregularities” during the voting exercise, the lead counsel said there were “frequent timeouts experienced by the site, lack of access to server backend, lack of graphical representation of results.”
audit call
In his post-election evaluation, Gadzama said he hired an IT specialist to test the server used for the polls.
“The specialist’s report dated Monday, July 18, 2022 also shows that there is a high probability that the system could be hacked and manipulated,” he alleged.
Calling for an audit of the elections, he said that “auditing the elections will allow independent parties and agents to discover if there was technical interference to usurp the will of the electorate.”
Mr. Gadzama appealed to the ECNBA to allow an immediate audit of the election and the server, adding that “it is clear that the technology adopted was highly vulnerable and more susceptible to electronic fraud, manipulation and vote pre-scheduling.”
Gadzama’s alleged ‘election fraud’ in 2016
In August 2016, the last time the NBA presidency was zoned in northern Nigeria, Gadzama ran for the job but lost to Abubakar Mahmoud.
This newspaper reported that Gadzama garnered 2,384 votes to emerge in second place behind Mahmoud, the eventual winner, who garnered 3,055 votes.
But Gadzama rejected the election result and called for its cancellation.
“We reject the election results and call for the immediate cancellation of the election for not being credible, transparent, free and fair, and failing to comply with the provisions of the NBA Constitution and Election Guidelines,” Gadzama said. the campaign group led by Garba Gajam had said in 2016.
In the run-up to the election, Gadzama’s campaign team accused Augustine Alegeh, then-NBA president, of a “blatant show of preference” for promoting Mahmoud.
The group accused Alegeh of colluding with the ECNBA on election day to ensure Mahmoud’s rise to become NBA president.
But Alegeh rejected Gadzama’s claims, saying the first electronic election was the best in the association’s history.
He recalled how Gadzama alleged voter fraud in 2010 after losing the NBA presidential election.
“When (Mr) Gadzama also lost the elections in 2010, he made a similar accusation, that the elections were moved to Ibadan just to deprive him of the chance to win,” Mr Alegeh recalled.
History of the controversy
Since the NBA began voting electronically in 2016 to ensure universal suffrage for all its members and halted its traditional election by delegates, the integrity of the association’s polls has been called into question particularly by losing presidential candidates.
In the previous election in 2020 that produced outgoing NBA President Olumide Akpata, one of the presidential candidates who placed third in the three-horse presidential race, Dele Adesina, SAN, raised a number of issues with the poll and asked for his cancellation. .
It alleged, among other things, that the designation of the service provider for electronic voting was made solely by the then president of the NBA, Paul Usoro (SAN).
He also said the election committee did not release the voter list until five hours before the election, in violation of the NBA Constitution.
It alleged, among other things, the loading of “predetermined data at the place of the election and the deprivation of the right to vote of some 14,000 possible voters”, and the “manipulation and filling of the voter list that contained 4,464 names of alleged lawyers without branch offices”.
He also complained about the erroneous labeling of 86 lawyers’ names under the ‘International Diaspora’ category, list inflation in some branches, among others.
But responding to Mr. Adesina’s complaint, the association’s Board of Trustees rejected the petitioner’s call for the cancellation of the widely criticized survey.
The NBA BoT admitted that Mr. Adesina’s August 2, 2020 petition raised issues of serious concern about the conduct of the election, but urged him to overlook the exercise’s flaws in the cohesive spirit of the bar.
The BoT response dated August 19, 2020 and signed by its president, Olisa Agbakoba, a leading advocate and former president of the NBA, noted that although the election was not perfect, the BoT could not advise that the election be cancelled.” usually”. interest of the legal profession.